Well, I followed through on my commitment to dope out my BSoD (thanks to all who
offered help and suggestions), and was victorious, in that failing sort of way.
I devoted a little more attention to the logs and determined I did have a
hardware issue with my RAM. I got four matched sticks of RAM and installed them,
and sure enough, my system passed the RAM test it previously failed. As for the
bad news, this may come under the heading of not fixing something that isn't
broken (I mentioned my system crashes were pretty infrequent), as when I headed
out to the wasteland to play Borderlands 2 with my buddies last night, I began
suffering all sorts of texture glitches and pauses, making the game unplayable,
and some visual glitches are also showing up in desktop applications. So even
though it was fine before my RAM swap, my new GTX 760 is now acting all flaky:
3DMark runs for a while, but eventually halts with one of two errors, the
benchmark either quits saying Windows lost focus, or quits saying the video card
was disconnected. I found forum posts suggesting EVGA cards don't like beta
drivers, so I rolled back to the WHQL-certified drivers, but to no avail. The
event viewer shows I have multiple listings of Event 500 and Event 501, which
suggest switching to Windows 7 basic, and while these errors may well be related
to my issue, they also date back not only to before I was experiencing these
problems, but before I replaced my video card. Things are messed up enough that
may have to turn to truly desperate measures and actually call EVGA tech
support. Shudder. Wish me luck.

Calling EVGA tech is damn painless. I had a brand new 560ti die on me right from the store, they gave me an RMA number and a phone number. Told me to go back to the store for an exchange, and have the reseller call the number. It was an authorization on EVGA's behalf to jump the card up from a stock 560ti to their 560ti superclocked with backplate. Roughly an extra $50 on the card.

But before you go calling EVGA, pull and reseat the card. I've run across a few times where even bumping the card while seated will cause poor contact with the card and the PCI-E slot. But 500/501 errors can mean a whole lot of nothing. Or a whole lot of something, thats the real problem with them.

--"For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution; and it is always wrong." --H.L. Mencken

HorrorScope wrote on Sep 10, 2013, 10:54:Even though these types of things are frustrating (esp. when it's compounded being more than one pc of HW) and console players point to as an issue like this as a big negative to gaming on a pc. I believe there is a real hidden benefit, it pays to know how to fix things like this.

I routinely point parent/kids to get their kids on PC's for gaming. I tell them, if your kid is going to play it should be on a PC, they are getting good experience using that pc, they will learn many things outside of direct gaming, where on a console, they learn nothing. These skills will help in their professional life later on.

I agree completely!! When I bought my first real PC, I knew almost nothing about computers. I had one good friend who was a computer nerd (I use "nerd" as a compliment) and when I would call him for tech support he never fixed anything for me. Instead, he showed me how to trouble shoot the problem and use the internet to find a solution. This is the whole "give a man a fish/teach a man to fish" thing.

Just using a computer daily for the past 14 years I have learned so much about hardware, software, and networking that I easily passed the A+/Net+ certification tests and got a good job working at the "Help Desk" of a local company as a "Support Technician". The company paid for me to receive further education in the field and I really owe my whole adult life situation to buying that first PC in 1999.

If I had just bought a PlayStation or whatever back then, I don't know where I would be! I will gladly suffer the occasional glitch, crash, BSoD, etc for the wealth of knowledge I gain!

It always blows my mind to think how different my life would've been without that IBM Aptiva. Thanks Mom and Dad for the incredible foresight to know what a powerful tool a PC would be to a young kid. I've heard stories before of kids asking their parents for a computer after seeing one at a friend's or at school but that wasn't my experience. I really had little to no exposure to computers, I wanted a Nintendo but my parents got a family computer instead. I don't think they were really all that interested in it themselves. I'll have to ask them what influenced them to drop $3000+ back then when they were just scraping by.

HorrorScope wrote on Sep 10, 2013, 10:54:Even though these types of things are frustrating (esp. when it's compounded being more than one pc of HW) and console players point to as an issue like this as a big negative to gaming on a pc. I believe there is a real hidden benefit, it pays to know how to fix things like this.

I routinely point parent/kids to get their kids on PC's for gaming. I tell them, if your kid is going to play it should be on a PC, they are getting good experience using that pc, they will learn many things outside of direct gaming, where on a console, they learn nothing. These skills will help in their professional life later on.

I agree completely!! When I bought my first real PC, I knew almost nothing about computers. I had one good friend who was a computer nerd (I use "nerd" as a compliment) and when I would call him for tech support he never fixed anything for me. Instead, he showed me how to trouble shoot the problem and use the internet to find a solution. This is the whole "give a man a fish/teach a man to fish" thing.

Just using a computer daily for the past 14 years I have learned so much about hardware, software, and networking that I easily passed the A+/Net+ certification tests and got a good job working at the "Help Desk" of a local company as a "Support Technician". The company paid for me to receive further education in the field and I really owe my whole adult life situation to buying that first PC in 1999.

If I had just bought a PlayStation or whatever back then, I don't know where I would be! I will gladly suffer the occasional glitch, crash, BSoD, etc for the wealth of knowledge I gain!

Hassle free gaming, no need to constantly upgrade, this is why I finally jumped ship. PC gaming can be such a PITA, not that I totally abandoned the platform all together... Cause I got spurs that jingle, jangle, jingle :)... heh I probably would have if not for Valve (steam)

... anywho anytime I've had such issues with my PC my first step is usually to tear it down, clean contacts with eraser, then rebuild it. From there it's simply a pull shit out until its stable procedure.

I wanted to thank all of you for your words of support this last month, as it's been a very interesting time in my life, especially with yesterday being my dad's birthday (I really need to find out if I pissed off some sorta cosmic entity with how this all runs date wise).The one question I got from everyone is 'How are you doing?' and I would tell them that 'I don't know', but looking back on what happened I have to actually say 'I'm ok'.With my dad, I was too young and ignorant and never had the opportunity to say what I wanted to say so many years ago, but with my mom I look at it this way: I got to tell her that I loved her, and she isn't suffering from her constant health problems, and as much of a non-religious person that I am, I find comfort that she and my dad together.

And again to all of you, you have my heartfelt thanks, as this has been my outlet during this enduring time.

"I've never seen a feature like this before. It warms your ass. It's wonderful" -Walter Bishop

Blu this may be as simple as needing to re-set your video card. During the instillation of the new memory it's entirely possible the video card was every so slightly dislodged. I was having memory-based BSOD's recently myself and simply re-socketing them fixed the issue. Make sure the card and the contacts are clean as well.

Agent.X7 wrote on Sep 10, 2013, 13:03:Blue, a site (guessing it's for your ads) called c.berstad.com keeps hanging and not letting me view the actual website. I get the ads and a blank, blue page. I have to refresh a bunch of times for it to let me see the actual page.

eRe4s3r wrote on Sep 10, 2013, 11:24:By the way, all the horror stories and my own personal problems with EVGA cards made me buy an Gigabyte 670GTX and forgo all others...... no issues ever since that decision. YMMV

I still have my EVGA 560ti 1gig and haven't had any problems with it. And with the last upgrades to my system there isn't anything I can't run at max settings.

"I've never seen a feature like this before. It warms your ass. It's wonderful" -Walter Bishop

The last BSoD I had was years ago under Vista, I believe (now running Win8x64). I had a problem similar to yours--it was a real humdinger and a head-scratcher, too. BSoD's these days are almost always caused by hardware problems somewhere (software problems usually just dump you back to the desktop these days because post-XP Windows versions are very stable and can easily handle an application crash.)

What I discovered then was that sometimes the logs can be wrong--way off, even. Sometimes, depending on the particular hardware problem, OS diagnostics show where the OS detects the problem as opposed to where it actually is. Making a long story short, under Vista I kept getting a BSoD intermittently that kept telling me that the fault lay in my Catalyst driver--which should indicate a problem with my GPU somewhere--either in the driver or the gpu hardware. After much hair-pulling and exhaustive testing (drove me bananas), it turned out that I had two simultaneous hardware problems going on, neither of which involved the gpu or my gpu drivers:

1) Ram tests revealed that one of my DIMMs was bad. The only time that problem caused the BSoD was when a program or application happened to attempt to access that particular DIMM's memory space...Replaced the DIMM and the memory now passed the tests that it had been failing--but then--Bang!--another BSoD again implicating the gpu driver...

2) One of my hard drives was failing. That was the really weird one! As I said, the logs and the other diagnostic software was of little help to me. It was only by physically disconnecting my hard drives one-by-one that I isolated and solved *that* particular problem. After disconnecting a particular physical hard drive (I had 4 HD's installed at the time), the BSoD's vanished. Plugged the drive back in and the BSoD's intermittently came back--until I disconnected. After a week disconnected with no further BSoDs, I plugged it back in, and within an hour or two I got the same BSoD again. After replacing the drive I never had the BSoD problem again.

To sum up--two hardware problems were causing me intermittent BSoDs, and the problems were uncovered manually as opposed to by my OS diagnostic software--which never failed to incorrectly identify the problem. Hardware problems are like Dominoes, the source problem affects one component which affects another, and on and on until a system crash that generates a BSoD occurs. The automatic OS diagnostics pick up the last component to fail in the chain reaction, and the BSoD itself displays that software component as the culprit. But in my case the BSoD was wrong because the information revealed only the last software component to fail--my gpu driver--as the source of the problem. But it never was...;)

In these cases, unfortunately, only skilled manual component testing will allow you to isolate such hardware problems when they occur. But that's a big advantage in running a desktop PC--you *can* self-service your machine when you need to. With other devices and form factors if you open the case you void the warranty--and you become helpless before the whims of your particular manufacturer. And if you own a non-PC device (like a console) and it's out of warranty--cracking the case won't do you much good unless you can replace the faulty components inside with off-the-shelf equivalents--which will often not be the case. I guess this sums up the worst problem I've ever had with a desktop computer.

You'll eventually get this solved, I'm sure. And be the wiser for it, too!

It is well known that I do not make mistakes--so if you should happen across a mistake in anything I have written, be assured that I did not write it!